Red, White & Royal Blue (14 page)

Henry’s not offering any insights, or anything at all. He hasn’t answered a single one of Alex’s texts or calls.

“Okay, that’s it,” June says on a Wednesday afternoon, stomping out of her room and into the sitting room by their shared hallway. She’s in her workout clothes with her hair tied up. Alex hastily shoves his phone back into his pocket. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I have been trying to write for two hours and I can’t do it when I can hear you pacing.” She throws a baseball cap at him. “I’m going for a run, and you’re coming with me.”

Cash accompanies them to the Reflecting Pool, where June kicks the back of Alex’s knee to get him going, and Alex grunts and swears and picks up the pace. He feels like a dog that has to be taken on walks to get his energy out. Especially when June says, “You’re like a dog that has to be taken on walks to get his energy out.”

“I hate you sometimes,” he tells her, and he shoves his earbuds in and cranks up Kid Cudi.

He thinks, as he runs and runs and runs, the stupidest thing of all is that he’s straight.

Like, he’s pretty sure he’s straight.

He can pinpoint moments throughout his life when he thought to himself,
See, this means I can’t possibly be into guys.
Like when he was in middle school and he kissed a girl for the first time, and he didn’t think about a guy when it was happening, just that her hair was soft and it felt nice. Or when he was a sophomore in high school and one of his friends came out as gay, and he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that.

Or his senior year, when he got drunk and made out with Liam in his twin bed for an hour, and he didn’t have a sexual crisis about it—that had to mean he was straight, right? Because if he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn’t. That was just how horny teenage best friends were sometimes, like when they would get off at the same time watching porn in Liam’s bedroom … or that one time Liam reached over, and Alex didn’t stop him.

He glances over at June, at the suspicious quirk of her lips. Can she hear what he’s thinking? Does she know, somehow? June always knows things. He doubles his pace, if only to get the expression on her mouth out of his periphery.

On their fifth lap, he thinks back over his hormonal teens and remembers thinking about girls in the shower, but he also remembers fantasizing about a boy’s hands on him, about hard jawlines and broad shoulders. He remembers pulling his eyes off a teammate in the locker room a couple times, but that was, like, an objective thing. How was he supposed to know back then if he wanted to look like other guys, or if he
wanted
other guys? Or if his horny teenage urges actually even meant anything?

He’s a son of Democrats. It’s something he’s always been around. So, he always assumed if he weren’t straight, he would
just
know,
like how he knows that he loves cajeta on his ice cream or that he needs a tediously organized calendar to get anything done. He thought he was smart enough about his own identity that there weren’t any questions left.

They’re rounding the corner for their eighth lap now, and he’s starting to see some flaws in his logic. Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves they’re straight.

There’s another reason he never cared to examine things beyond the basic benchmark of being attracted to women. He’s been in the public eye since his mom became the favored 2016 nominee, the White House Trio the administration’s door to the teen and twenty-something demographic almost as long. All three of them—himself, June, and Nora—have their roles.

Nora is the cool brainy one, the one who makes inappropriate jokes on Twitter about whatever sci-fi show everyone’s watching, a bar trivia team ringer. She’s not straight—she’s never been straight—but to her, it’s an incidental part of who she is. She doesn’t worry about going public with it; feelings don’t consume her the way his do.

He looks at June—ahead of him now, caramel highlights in her swinging ponytail catching the midday sun—and he knows her place too. The intrepid
Washington Post
columnist, the fashion trendsetter everyone wants to have at their wine-and-cheese night.

But Alex is the golden boy. The heartthrob, the handsome rogue with a heart of gold. The guy who moves through life effortlessly, who makes everyone laugh. Highest approval ratings of the entire First Family. The whole point of him is that his appeal is as universal as possible.

Being … whatever he’s starting to suspect he might be, is
definitely not universally appealing to voters. He has a hard enough time being half-Mexican.

He wants his mom to keep her approval ratings up without having to manage a complication from her own family. He wants to be the youngest congressman in US history. He’s absolutely sure that guys who kissed a Prince of England and liked it don’t get elected to represent Texas.

But he thinks about Henry, and,
oh.

He thinks about Henry, and something twists in his chest, like a stretch he’s been avoiding for too long.

He thinks about Henry’s voice low in his ear over the phone at three in the morning, and suddenly he has a name for what ignites in the pit of his stomach. Henry’s hands on him, his thumbs braced against his temples back in the garden, Henry’s hands other places, Henry’s mouth, what he might do with it if Alex let him. Henry’s broad shoulders and long legs and narrow waist, the place his jaw meets his neck and the place his neck meets his shoulder and the tendon that stretches the length between them, and the way it looks when Henry turns his head to shoot him a challenging glare, and his impossibly blue eyes—

He trips on a crack in the pavement and goes tumbling down, skinning his knee and ripping his earbuds out.

“Dude, what the hell?” June’s voice cuts through the ringing in his ears. She’s standing over him, hands on her knees, brow furrowed, panting. “Your brain could not be more clearly in another solar system. Are you gonna tell me or what?”

He takes her hand and lets her pull him and his bloody knee up. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

June sighs, shooting him another look before finally dropping it. Once he’s limped back home behind her, she
disappears to shower and he stems the bleeding with a Captain America Band-Aid from his bathroom cabinet.

He needs a list. So: Things he knows right now.

One. He’s attracted to Henry.

Two. He wants to kiss Henry again.

Three. He has maybe wanted to kiss Henry for a while. As in, probably this whole time.

He ticks off another list in his head. Henry. Shaan. Liam. Han Solo. Rafael Luna and his loose collars.

Sidling up to his desk, he pulls out the binder his mother gave him:
DEMOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT: WHO THEY ARE AND HOW TO REACH THEM
. He drags his finger down to the LGBTQ+ tab and turns to the page he’s looking for, titled with mother’s typical flair:
THE B ISN’T SILENT: A CRASH COURSE ON BISEXUAL AMERICANS
.

“I wanna start now,” Alex says as he slams into the Treaty Room.

His mother lowers her glasses to the tip of her nose, eyeing him over a pile of papers. “Start what? Getting your ass beat for barging in here while I’m working?”

“The job,” he says. “The campaign job. I don’t wanna wait until I graduate. I already read all the materials you gave me. Twice. I have time. I can start now.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You got a bug up your butt?”

“No, I just…” One of his knees is bouncing impatiently. He forces it to stop. “I’m ready. I’ve got less than one semester left. How much more could I possibly need to know to do this? Put me in, Coach.”

Which is how he finds himself out of breath on a Monday afternoon after class, following a staffer who’s managed to surpass even him in the caffeination department, on a breakneck tour of the campaign offices. He gets a badge with his name and photo on it, a desk in a shared cubicle, and a WASPy cubicle mate from Boston named Hunter with an extremely punchable face.

Alex is handed a folder of data from the latest focus groups and told to start drafting policy ideas for the end of the following week, and WASPy Hunter asks him five hundred questions about his mom. Alex very professionally does not punch him. He just gets to work.

He’s definitely not thinking about Henry.

He’s not thinking about Henry when he puts in twenty-three hours in his first week of work, or when he’s filling the rest of his hours with class and papers and going for long runs and drinking triple-shot coffees and poking around the Senate offices. He’s not thinking about Henry in the shower or at night, alone and wide awake in his bed.

Except for when he is. Which is always.

This usually works. He doesn’t understand why it’s not working.

When he’s in the campaign offices, he keeps gravitating over to the big, busy whiteboards of the polling section, where Nora sits every day enshrined in graphs and spreadsheets. She’s made easy friends with her coworkers, since competence translates directly to popularity in the campaign social culture, and nobody’s better at numbers than her.

He’s not jealous, exactly. He’s popular in his own department, constantly cornered at the Keurig for second opinions on people’s drafts and invited to after-work drinks he never
has time for. At least four staffers of various genders have hit on him, and WASPy Hunter won’t stop trying to convince him to come to his improv shows. He smiles handsomely over his coffee and makes sarcastic jokes and the Alex Claremont-Diaz Charm Initiative is as effective as ever.

But Nora makes
friends,
and Alex ends up with acquaintances who think they know him because they’ve read his profile in
New York
magazine
,
and perfectly fine people with perfectly fine bodies who want to take him home from the bar. None of it is satisfying—it never has been, not really, but it never mattered as much as it does now that there’s the sharp counterpoint of Henry, who
knows
him. Henry who’s seen him in glasses and tolerates him at his most annoying and still kissed him like he wanted him, singularly, not the idea of him.

So it goes, and Henry is there, in his head and his lecture notes and his cubicle, every single stupid day, no matter how many shots of espresso he puts in his coffee.

Nora would be the obvious choice for help, if not for the fact that she’s neck deep in polling numbers. When she gets into her work like this, it’s like trying to have a meaningful conversation with a high-speed computer that loves Chipotle and makes fun of what you’re wearing.

But she’s his best friend, and she’s sort of vaguely bisexual. She never dates—no time or desire—but if she did, she says it’d be an even distribution of the intern pool. She’s as knowledgeable about the topic as she is about everything else.

“Hello,” she says from the floor as he drops a bag of burritos and a second bag of chips with guacamole on the coffee table. “You might have to put guacamole directly into my
mouth with a spoon because I need both hands for the next forty-eight hours.”

Nora’s grandparents, the Veep and Second Lady, live at the Naval Observatory, and her parents live just outside of Montpelier, but she’s had the same airy one-bedroom in Columbia Heights since she transferred from MIT to GW. It’s full of books and plants she tends to with complex spreadsheets of watering schedules. Tonight, she’s sitting on her living room floor in a glowing circle of screens like some kind of Capitol Hill s
é
ance.

To her left, her campaign laptop is open to an indecipherable page of data and bar graphs. To her right, her personal computer is running three news aggregators at the same time. In front of her, the TV is broadcasting CNN’s Republican primary coverage, while the tablet in her lap is playing an old episode of
Drag Race.
She’s holding her iPhone in her hand, and Alex hears the little whoosh of an email sending before she looks up at him.

“Barbacoa?” she says hopefully as Alex drops onto the couch.

“I’ve met you before today, so, obviously.”

“There’s my future husband.” She leans over to pull a burrito out of the bag, rips off the foil, and shoves it into her mouth.

“I’m not going to have a marriage of convenience with you if you’re always embarrassing me with the way you eat burritos,” Alex says, watching her chew. A black bean falls out of her mouth and lands on one of her keyboards.

“Aren’t you from Texas?” she says through her mouthful. “I’ve seen you shotgun a bottle of barbecue sauce. Watch yourself or I’m gonna marry June instead.”

This might be his opening into “the conversation.”
Hey, you
know how you’re always joking about dating June? Well, like, what if I dated a guy?
Not that he wants to date Henry. At all. Ever. But just, like, hypothetically.

Nora goes off on a data nerd tangent for the next twenty minutes about her updated take on whatever the fuck the Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm is and variables and how it can be used in whatever work she’s doing for the campaign, or something. Honestly, Alex’s concentration is drifting in and out. He’s just working on summoning up courage until she talks herself into submission.

“Hey, so, uh,” Alex attempts as she takes a burrito break. “Remember when we dated?”

Nora swallows a massive bite and grins. “Why yes, I do, Alejandro.”

Alex forces a laugh. “So, knowing me as well as you do—”

“In the biblical sense.”

“Numbers on me being into dudes?”

That pulls Nora up short, before she cocks her head to the side and says, “Seventy-eight percent probability of latent bisexual tendencies. One hundred percent probability this is not a hypothetical question.”

“Yeah. So.” He coughs. “Weird thing happened. You know how Henry came to New Year’s? He kinda … kissed me?”

“Oh, no shit?” Nora says, nodding appreciatively. “Nice.”

Alex stares at her. “You’re not surprised?”

“I mean.” She shrugs. “He’s gay, and you’re hot, so.”

He sits up so quickly he almost drops his burrito on the floor. “Wait, wait—what makes you think he’s gay? Did he tell you he was?”